the one great choice

The wind  blowing a gale from the north, a hard glittering cacophany of wind. I sit in the kitchen peeling the small tartly sweet tangerines known as naartjes out here. A luxury to breakfast on fruit.  From all my doubtings and musings this last week I have surfaced with a handful of  grit and  dust and the odd pearly nacreous treasure, motley insights about depression, loneliness, simple unhappiness.

Xenophobic riots in a nearby farming town, Nigerian-owned shops burned down. Then  quiet again, seeming tranquillity with tensions  sinking below the surface for a few weeks or  months. The desperation of  poverty and  deprivation,  the threat of destitution, the communities that fail those at the edges.

The wind blowing hard so that tree branches rasp together. On the counter next to the sink I have a small pile of French beans to be topped and tailed, a chapter to be written, a fiction scene making and unmaking itself in my head. The dogs sit in a queue waiting for their 9am biscuits, obedient and trusting.  The writing sticks and stumbles in my mind, the analogical imagination at odds with the dialectical imagination. I’m reading Clarice Lispector:

Now I’m going to write wherever my hand leads: I won’t fiddle with whatever it writes. This is a way to have no lag between the instant and I: I act in the core of the instant. But there’s still some lag. It starts like this: as love impedes death, and I don’t know what I mean by that. I trust in my own incomprehension that gives me life free of understanding, I lost friends, I don’t understand death. The horrible duty is to go to the end. And counting on no one. To live your life yourself. And to suffer as much to dull myself a bit. Because I can no longer carry the sorrows of the world. What can I do when I feel totally what other people are and feel? I live them but no longer have the strength. I don’t want to tell even myself certain things. It would be to betray the is-itself. I feel that I know some truths. But truths have no words.

On the other end of the phone a friend wanting a recipe for an Asian laksa, so I  fetch a cookbook and sit poring over combinations of  minced lemongrass, holy basil, spring onions, garlic, chillies, lime juice, coconut milk. We laugh, and in between the  details of the recipe we gossip, nothing too malicious, joking and teasing, thinking about how hard it is to spoon up noodles and slurp spicy broth without spilling. We spill and burn a little, all of us, learning to cook, learning to  connect.What can be said and what is better left silent.

But so much is sayable, so much  can be said to work its rough magic on us — from Adrienne Rich, on the one great choice underlying all our other choices and decisions, the choice to live no matter what, to embrace it all, endure it all, to know radical acceptance  –

Dreamwood

By Adrienne Rich

In the old, scratched, cheap wood of the typing stand

there is a landscape, veined, which only a child can see

or the child’s older self, a poet,

a woman dreaming when she should be typing

the last report of the day. If this were a map,

she thinks, a map laid down to memorize

because she might be walking it, it shows

ridge upon ridge fading into hazed desert

here and there a sign of aquifers

and one possible watering-hole. If this were a map

it would be the map of the last age of her life,

not a map of choices but a map of variations

on the one great choice. It would be the map by which

she could see the end of touristic choices,

of distances blued and purpled by romance,

by which she would recognize that poetry

isn’t revolution but a way of knowing

why it must come. If this cheap, mass-produced

wooden stand from the Brooklyn Union Gas Co.,

mass-produced yet durable, being here now,

is what it is yet a dream-map

so obdurate, so plain,

she thinks, the material and the dream can join

and that is the poem and that is the late report.

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